Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [66]
Was his brother better? Roberto was clever, Andrés intelligent. Roberto calculating, Andrés spontaneous. Roberto the actor in a smiling deception, Andrés the protagonist in a drama of sincerity. Both victims, the father suspected with sorrow. As an adolescent, Andrés had committed to the leftist struggle. He didn’t marry. Politics, he said, was his legitimate wife. His lover was his adolescent sweetheart in Chilpancingo. At times he visited her. Other times she came to the capital. Andrés lived in the house of his father, the general, but he didn’t bring the girl home. Not because of bourgeois convention but because he wanted her all to himself and didn’t care to have anyone judge her, not even himself.
On the other hand, Roberto, at the age of twenty-eight, had been married and divorced twice. He changed wives according to his own idea of social prestige. He began in a high-technology company, decided to start his own electromagnetic equipment business, but his ambition was to be a software magnate. Things were not going too well for him now, which was why he returned, a divorced man, to his father’s house, following the “Italian” law—today universal—of living at home for as long as possible and in this way saving on rent, food, and domestic help. He always had women, since he was good-looking—“cute,” his father said to himself—but he didn’t bring them home or mention them.
One woman united father and sons, the mother, Peregrina Valdés, dead of colic before the boys reached adolescence.
“Take care of them for me, Marcelino. I know your discipline, but also give them the love you gave to me.”
Roberto was very different from his brother. Lighter-skinned, with a green-eyed gaze walled in by suspicion. He shaved twice a day as if to file down all the rough spots on a face that demanded trust without ever receiving it completely.
The warm memories of his family did not prevent the general from acknowledging the discouragement of his troops. Every day, inch by inch, they explored the Guerrero Mountains. The general was methodical. Nobody could accuse of him of negligence in his mission, which was to seek out the rebels in every corner of the sierra. Miles knew his effort was useless. First, because the rebel band was small and the mountains immense. The revolutionaries knew it and hid easily, constantly changing their position. They were the needles in a gigantic haystack. The general explored the sierra from the air and could not make out a single road, much less a village. In the vast extension of the mountains, not even a solitary wisp of smoke betrayed life. The dense growth admitted no space other than its own compact green nature.
And second, because the troops under his command knew that he knew. Each day they resumed the trek, aware they would never find the enemy. No one dared to say aloud what he was thinking: that this useless campaign of General Miles saved them from confronting the rebels. Until now they had fired only at rabbits and turkey buzzards. The first were fast and offered an exciting game of marksmanship. The second devoured the dead rabbits, stealing them from the soldiers.
The pact of deception between the commander and the troops allowed Marcelino Miles to enjoy the gratitude of his men and avoid recriminations from headquarters. Let them ask any soldier if the general had or had not carried out the order to search for the rebels in the sierra. Let them just ask. The commander’s well-being was also that of the troops.
They had spent six weeks on this ghostly campaign when something happened that the general hadn’t expected and the troops never would have imagined.
Quartered in Chilpancingo after three weeks of exploring the wild, Marcelino Miles and his soldiers had an air of duty fulfilled that authorized a couple of peaceful days for them. Though the general understood that the troops knew as well as he did that the guerrillas were not in the mountains, the physical effort of climbing and exploring redeemed